SOURCE: Golden, Morris. “Public Context and Imagining Self in Pamela and Shamela.” ELH 53, no. 2 (summer 1986): 311-329.

[In the following essay, Golden examines the social and cultural context in which Pamela and Shamela were written, which he argues is of particular interest because it sheds light on the origins of the novel.]

Most people would grant that Pamela, Fielding's responses, and the modern novel generally rose out of the powerful economic, demographic, religious, folkloric, and literary forces and traditions that have been so ably defined in the scholarship of the past few decades. But we may still ask why and how one particular printer and one particular journalist, of widely differing histories and self-perceptions, imagined the England of their specific time (1739-41) into the burgeoning English novel. Any answer would have to be tentative, but when the subject is the origin of our dominant literary genre, even partially increased understanding is worth seeking.

To begin with, we have Richardson's word that Pamela sprang from an actual event in the distant past. While he was writing the Familiar Letters, a sampler commissioned by a group of the most reputable bookseller-printers in London, he recalled an old story of an aristocrat and a lower-class girl. If the stimulus was the notorious Charteris rape trial of February and March 1730, as scholars have argued, we may wonder why it took almost a decade to come to mind. But again, in partial answer, we may note a rash of newspaper items of about that time that might have coalesced with the memory of the trial to keep it vivid. For one thing, the marriage a year earlier of the Beggar's Opera's second Polly to a rich gentleman, joining her (and Pamela's) renowned predecessor Lavinia Fenton, would have contributed to the story.¹ In a Universal Spectator notice (July 24, 1731), similar elements surface: a clergyman is arrested for marrying a seventeen-year-old Eton boy to a servant maid. In one sort of refinement on the relationship, the Universal Spectator of June 23, 1733, reports on a servant woman's suing her master for imprisoning her for three days, to remind Pamela's creator of her rights as a freeborn Englishwoman when Mr. B. won't let her go.

For the contribution of fiction, take “Constant and Fidelia: or Virtue Rewarded” in the Weekly Register of September 18 and 25 and October 2, 1731. A decent man, Constant, is corrupted by the times and a vicious old woman to attempt Fidelia's seduction. He thinks he has her when the old woman arranges for them to be in the bedroom, but Fidelia begs and fights him off, and eventually, despite evil influences and interference, they marry—enough analogies to the overall plot of Pamela, to the behavior of Mrs. Jewkes, and to a specific notorious scene, coupled with the same distinctive subtitle, to suggest absorption into Richardson's mind for much later fruition. Autobiographical letters to periodicals, fiction conventionally masquerading as fact, run to this theme too. On September 21, 1734, the Weekly Register contained a letter from a servant woman who had been persuaded, after the death of her mistress, to stay on as housekeeper and be her master's lover on assurance of marriage, had then been abandoned, and was now a self-conscious warning to others. From another perspective, in the Universal Spectator of October 12, 1734, Prudentia warns against young gentlemen's marrying their parents' serving maids and thereby ruining whole families, as her brother was about to do. A year later, the Universal Spectator of October 11, 1735, has the autobiography of a prostitute who had been ruined by her father's landlord, who made great offers and anticipated Mr. B's and Lovelace's plans by using “a Maid Servant who lay with me” as a go-between.

At a time when retrospection on his own life might help Richardson shape Pamela's story, and when the national situation encouraged such a shape, these gathered impressions could well contribute to it too. Walpole's imminent fall, Richardson's sense of what sort of person he himself was, and the rise of a paragon servant girl to power through marriage with a prepotent gentleman, I am suggesting, shift and merge and reflect each other in the novelist's imagination. The very commission to write the sampler, in conjunction with his massive edition of the Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, was a testimonial of how far he had come to join the professional/scholarly elite. The Familiar Letters, moreover, intended to open the ways of the world to the inexperienced young, would have directed his imagination—at precisely fifty, a time of self-evaluation for an introspective person—toward his own launching.

The imminence of massive change in the nation, influencing other literary imaginations besides his, would have supported the recollection of an ending and a beginning in his own life. The attacks on Walpole were noticeably gathering strength and confidence; if the prime minister survived 1739 by yielding to public demand for war with Spain (another critical change), he would go in 1740, or 1741, or 1742. Pope's Dunciad, which had originally crowned a new king when the country began a new reign, now in 1741 conceives the replacement of one King Dunce with another and expects a new world of political confusion under the Goddess Dullness; Dyer's Ruins of Rome of 1740 contemplates the fall of one polity (Rome's) and hopes for the continued prosperity of another (England's); Shenstone's Schoolmistress of 1741, like Walpole in her position, manipulative values, and even appearance, is an ambiguous memory.

Particularly in a contemporary tradition of national allegory—the Craftsman, Common Sense, and the Daily Gazetteer indulge often in dream visions of Britannia and Augusta troubled or triumphant (and are joined by all poetic tempers, including Thomson's in “Rule Britannia,” with the onset of war)—the novel's frequent elevated metaphors nudge us to read at least the outlines of national destiny into its plot. The conception of Walpole's rise and fall in terms of a genteel household would not be strange for Richardson, or for anyone reasonably sensitive to the influences of his day. Power appeared publicly in the form of a reigning but disunited royal family, ministers competing for royal favor and national support, and politicians seeking office or rank by associating themselves with the Court or with opposing groups. Comparing the family to the organization of power was universal in the period, as we need no more than Fielding's farces The Grub Street Opera (1731) and The Historical Register (1737) to show. The reverse was still taken for granted too, that the power center was indeed a family. Even Walpole looks to Hervey like a private steward to the king, and his dealings with the royal family echo that association.² Well-publicized divisions within that family, with both parents or (after 1737) the widowed king widely known to be at odds with the Prince of Wales through most of the 1730s and 1740s, stimulated the prince's centrality in the national Opposition to Walpole.³ It is not surprising, therefore, that Richardson's novels are full of political images for the family in struggle. In Pamela, though it is surely no allegory, the main opponents suggest a time when one master deals most intensely with one aspirant. They may separately reflect different figures—the king, Prince Federick, Walpole, each of whom has some analogies to Mr. B., as Walpole, the queen, the king's mistress, and Frederick have to Pamela—but the singleness of power is importantly contributed by the specific time, before Walpole's fall but with that as a possibility. Richardson's identification with Mr. B., less extensive than with Pamela though more immediately apparent, directly ties the couple to British royalty.

A series of passages spread through the novel keeps the royal analogy before us. “I hope,” says Pamela, “that God will give me his Grace, so as to hate and withstand his Temptations, were he not only my Master, but my King, for the Sin's sake.”⁴ Her refusal to cooperate, says Mrs. Jewkes, “is down-right Rebellion” (116). The clergyman Peters claims to be helpless to interfere with Mr. B.'s lust, like present “fathers of the Church, in regard to the first Personages of the Realm” (123). Like a king, Mr. B. can make a lady of the Andrews's draggle-tailed guttersnipe (251), who says, “I ought to resign myself implicitly to your Will” (253). Sir Simon calls Pamela's delayed coming at B.'s request “your first Crime of Laesae Majestatis” (334). Pamela thinks that “there is as much Majesty as Goodness” in Mr. B. (351) and that Lady Davers “has a presence as majestick for a Lady, as her dear Brother has for a Gentleman” (354).

Justifying himself in the argument with his sister (itself a reflection of domestic royal squabbles well publicized from the time of King William and very noisy in the 1730s), Mr. B. chooses the most exalted parallels: “When the noble Family of Stuart ally'd itself into the low Family of Hyde … did any body scruple to call the Lady Royal Highness, and Duchess of York? And did any body think her Daughters, the late Queen Mary and Queen Anne, less Royal for that?” (349). As a “majestick Mortal” he has other favorites (373), dispenses pensions, charity, and awards, and has a bastard, a royal by-blow like George II's Monsieur Louis who is almost acknowledged.⁵ Like George and Richardson, he has two residences; one, like England for the king and London for Richardson, is a place of cares and obstinate servants; the other, like Hanover and Parson's Green, is largely reserved for recreation, and as in the king's case for permitted dalliance.⁶ At the same time, Pamela on her own might well have fused with Queen Caroline just beneath a contemporary writer's or reader's consciousness, in her political function and personality. The queen, as Coxe describes her, “almost entirely governed the king during the first ten years of his reign.”⁷ She earned and cultivated a reputation for cleverness, patronized learned men, was tactful and dignified, and “had a happy turn for conversation, and a readiness in adapting her discourse to the persons with whom she talked; possessed peculiar talents for mirth and humour; excelled in mimicry, and was fond of displaying it.”⁸

As if bent on stimulating the new art form, public interest had recently evoked another queen important to its inauguration. Old Mrs. B. is for Pamela analogous to Queen Anne for Richardson; and Queen Anne's memory, never stale for Tory pamphleteers, had been freshened in the late 1730s for the general public. The pious publisher Thomas Worrall advertised a poem on her, new statues of her were set up in Cavendish Square, Blenheim, and Westminster Abbey, and she was praised for the comparative modesty of her funeral.⁹ The genesis of Pamela includes, therefore, besides the evocative effect of Queen Caroline's death, the likely incursion into Richardson's mind of the passing of a national motherly figure at a time when he was stepping into independence, a figure moreover who like Mrs. B. was certified (by the Duchess of Marlborough) as having been “extremely well-bred, [and who] treated Her chief Ladies and Servants as if they had been Her Equals. Her Behaviour to all that approached Her was decent, and full of Dignity, and shewed Condescension, without Art or Meanness.”¹⁰

In the aspiring character Pamela Richardson's imagination fuses universal archetypes and yearnings from his youth to rise from obscurity to prominence, from innocence to experience, from childhood to the world of danger and opportunity. But it borrows the characteristics for a noble consort who is also an arriviste and manipulator from two prominent exemplars: Queen Caroline and Sir Robert Walpole. Although Walpole came from a substantial landed family, the position he had achieved was so elevated that Fielding's description of him in a Champion piece two months before Pamela was a normal opposition view: in the strange country where Job Vinegar is touring, TRYs and WHGs are uniting to defend themselves against a terrible monster “who sprung up in one Night, like a Mushroom, out of a Dunghill, and, it is thought, would in a short Time have destroyed both these Animals.”¹¹

The novel begins with its heroine, like Richardson and the Walpole of political myth, prepared for a life of higher achievement than her birth promised. Her mistress and protectress has died just as Pamela is old enough to be desirable and educated enough to think she can make her way: Richardson was made a Freeman of the Stationers' Company in 1715, shortly after his and England's old mistress Queen Anne had died and been replaced by a different sort of ruler. At once Richardson establishes Pamela's uncertainty about the motives of the new master and about political realities, from which a future opens full of danger but also of the greatest opportunity: wife to Mr. B. and ruler of the polity of the family, of printing, of literature, or of England.

At every stage we can imagine Pamela's struggles, devices, victories, and defeats as reflections of the various dimensions of Richardson's own move through life. As her level of reputable desirability rises, she must deal with scorn or petting by the gentry, corruptive offers from men, cold rejection by the institutional clergyman Peters, and Williams's courtship. Struggling with herself and others over escaping from the seductive danger of Mr. B., Pamela seems to project an imaginative reliving of Richardson's early ventures from apprenticeship through marriage, setting up in business, and Jacobite fling, and even of his recent moves from the safe routine of printing to the challenges of scholarship, public moralizing, and now fiction. In her fantasies of capture by robbers or mauling by a bull, we may conceive not only the author's recollections of how it felt to contemplate the wide world, and the effect of the world's response, but also something of his current worries about his status. Richardson kept the earlier focus on Pamela's innocence, but the guilt that for him accompanied the successful venture surfaces in these vivid fantasies.

With the dangerous visit of Lady Davers and Jacky H. (317-31), Richardson highlights the problems of the transformation. In this scene the new royal favorite is misunderstood and wrongly accused: again, echoes of bad fairies and stepmothers, even a rare literary source (Marivaux's Vie de Marianne, whose heroine is abused by her suitor's noble family¹²) mingle with the attacks any successful author or politician evokes and the guilt that accompanies competitive success. Such trial scenes of heroines and male protagonists, often embarrassing, proliferate in Richardson's novels, as his letters are full of disclaimers of special knowledge (as of languages or the classics) to ward off attackers. In this scene and its sequel, Richardson confirms the legality of the favorite's change, its psychological precariousness, and his delight in winning against all those who have been forced to let him in. After the event the favorite congratulates herself on having achieved her status virtuously, for otherwise she would have had the horror of public exposure (339)—as if the regularly threatened parliamentary examining committee were to find evidence of Walpole's financial chicanery.

As the novel's action recapitulates Richardson's sense of his moves, so it also surveys the establishment of a new polity after the death of a ruler has left dangerous openings to chaos—to arbitrary tyranny. Richardson associates with Pamela's rise the civilizing of the ruler, Mr. B., who has tendencies toward the arbitrariness of the first two Georges, the public absurdity of Prince Frederick, and the manipulative courtiership of Walpole. Like the other servants a holdover from the time of the previous ruler, but becoming specially interesting to the new one, Pamela refuses his first terms of total submission and is apparently dismissed (45) amid frequent discussions by the servants of how one should properly deal with the master (47-48). Once Mr. B. has dismissed Pamela's loyal partisan Mrs. Jervis, he offers Pamela an immediate bribe, a pension, and a respectable settlement (marriage to a decent man), echoing what Walpole was normally accused of doing, what he was in fact preparing to do for the Prince of Wales to overcome his opposition.

The spiriting away of Pamela, the consequence of a conspiracy ordered from above, recalls the opposition press's pictures of how Walpole operated and also the rumors—at times fed by facts—of Jacobite plots in high places. Kidnapped, Pamela finds herself in a series of complicated political situations in which more than ever she must succeed on her own abilities, but by now she has learned enough about strategy and political morality to undertake party politics. In conquering the world alone, she manifests above all her individuality, power and resourcefulness at stratagems, thereby joining Mr. B. in sizeable debts to the successful prime minister's public image. Apparently isolated and even conspired against, she picks up gifts from her captors' weaknesses: “in hopes to get a Party” among the people at whose house the coach rests, she “began to tamper with the Farmer and his Wife” (100). At the new house, she has talked “to one of the Maids just now, indeed a little to tamper with her by degrees” (106), and resolves to use John Arnold's guilty conscience as well as the clothes he brought down to her from the other house (111). After allowing her natural energy to show in sauciness to Mrs. Jewkes, she ruefully acknowledges that it had “ruin'd the only Project I had left” (116)—like the prime minister, in prints and satires “The Projector” since his Excise scheme,¹³ recognizing a political mistake. After finding an unreachable jailer in Mrs. Jewkes, who looks and in her hard good humor behaves rather like Walpole, Pamela rightly makes overtures to Williams, hoping he will counter the ruler. But Williams, reflecting a number of weak possibilities for coping with royal power (at a guess, as an alienated clergyman suggesting incompetent Jacobitism), is unworldly and therefore culpably irresponsible. Wicked as Mr. B. has been so far, he is clearly better formed to rule than this virtuous bumbler. When Mr. B. arrived, “[h]e put on a stern and majestick Air” (160) and, like a king or his chief agent, offered Pamela money, an estate, a pension, and family perquisites, threatening force if rejected. But happily his good basic character and elevated mind cause him to set the situation right, and he restores the favorite after pretending she is in disgrace; having found that terror merely disorganized, he will now work through kindness (180).

But Mr. B.'s choice is not yet settled, for he must check Pamela's loyalty, examine her letters to discover her actions and motives—and one is inevitably reminded of the security problem posed by the endemic Jacobite threat, of the famous trials of the Jacobites Wharton, Atterbury, and their subordinates in the 1720s, of the government raids in search of documents that may have endangered the youthful Richardson.¹⁴ Much as it was indebted to the improvements in delivering public mails in the seventeenth century and the success of the Letters of a Portuguese Nun in the eighteenth, the epistolary novel developed by Richardson owed a great deal to the Jacobite conspiracy emanating by correspondence from the continent, the English government's countermeasures, and the new importance of public opinion and its instruments. Forcing Pamela to produce the papers, B. is accused of “sad Tyranny” (203) as he probes motives and attitudes toward himself under the pretense of seeking evidence of treason; but if he is a king, the two are the same. The documents of course vindicate the loyal servant Pamela, who is therefore wooed back. One affecting test of loyalty, Mr. B.'s illness—like George II's in 1737, which the Prince of Wales and his courtiers had failed¹⁵—finally exalts Pamela. Immediately, Robin the coachman (a name and function inevitably suggesting Walpole to contemporaries) hopes that Pamela will triumph over Mrs. Jewkes, for it will now be safe to follow conscience and a good ministry (218).

After Pamela's great trials, stratagems, and equivocations—the devices by which she accommodates herself to the invaded higher world—the marriage, picking up echoes from romance, hagiography, psychological autobiography, evangelical Christianity, and status initiation rituals (like Richardson's acquiring the freedom of the Stationers' Company), will change her in all the traditional ways and also transmute her from base to noble social metal: “what strange Creatures are Men! Gentlemen, I should say rather!” (212), she says as she prepares to enter their strange life. For Richardson, his first marriage opened the world of practical achievement; for her, sexual joy, social status, and also appointment as permanent prime minister, the consequence and inauguration of complicated negotiations of great importance to the family polity.

With reference to Jewkes and the other servants—continuing ministers—the new favorite plans an amnesty. Mr. B. gives her money to dispense, the equivalent of patronage, and provides for her parents a choice place and pension, strictly following the norms of the time. In the Bedfordshire estate, Pamela's original place of service, she forgives the servant (John Arnold) who had wronged her with a sore conscience in obedience to Mr. B., and she makes sure that she restores her old party leaders, Mrs. Jervis and Longman, to high office. Williams, dependent on the new favorite, had early been readmitted some way into favor on her account (240), and now is reintegrated (as Richardson hoped clerical extremists would be) into the polity as an ally. Not only does the arrangement resolve the problem of competing possible rulers, but all the battling wills—B. and Pamela, B. and Lady Davers, Pamela and Lady Davers, and so on—are reconciled in that establishment of popular authority united with legitimacy. In short, Richardson is using his fable to provide an ideal polity for his world.

Pamela is of course not a political allegory intended to legitimize the Hanoverian succession, but the wedding does at least suggest such a process through a new compact, between the throne and the English people. Pamela even codifies Mr. B.'s monarchal lecture into forty-eight wifely rules in the light of the true conditions of their state: a written constitution as well as the first records of the new administration (369-72). As for those with an earlier claim on the ruler, when Jacky H. asks for the reconciliation, he acts as public opinion, urging the cooperation of king and courtier in the new regime, and confirms acceptance of the new compact by the dissident nobles: in the politics of the day, perhaps a wishful answer both to long-standing Jacobite objections to the Hanoverians and to more immediate opposition to Walpole's probable successor. We have also been guaranteed that while there will be a new alertness and new life, society will follow the order established in the past. A fresh unity has been forged among its members, but they will act in the fine old way. Richardson's alter ego has moved into a slot that needed filling, and will make the renewed organic whole vigorous and just.

In Pamela, then, Richardson ties his sense of himself to the sort of story exciting on the level of lecherous squire and maiden, morally uplifting in the religious tradition, socially responsive on issues like the proper place of women or servants and the uses of education for the lower classes, and animated by some of the major concerns of the day: who should rule in the family? who should rule in the nation, and how? who does in fact rule, and how should this be changed? He is able to see projections of himself acting out the changes and the forces of his day, and he shapes these actions positively, envisaging coherence in the family and the nation as symbolic consequences of his rise.

It is this issue of establishing coherence that makes the book last almost as long after the transforming wedding as before. Richardson must spend the time to arrive at reconciliation, for one thing to assuage the guilt of winning the competition and thereby disturbing the universe. He made a point of arguing in Pamela II and in private letters that he was not advocating the marriage of squires to their mother's chambermaids, only making manifest the extraordinary qualities of this one chambermaid. She is painstakingly shown cleaving to the old values politically, socially, and intellectually; as he himself supports the traditional morality and literary standards, and gets along very well with all serious political positions; as the last great politician Walpole has been a pragmatist rather than a political philosopher. There is a power vacuum at the B.'s after the mother dies, as there had been after earlier reigns and would be soon when Walpole fell. None of the traditional aspirants—the gentlewomen offered in marriage to Mr. B.—are suitable to fill it, and Pamela fits.¹⁶ United with the vitality she demonstrated by leaping above her station, the ruler can do his job better than those other squires who settle for the ordinary, and he can make England a harmony of varied interests, a new-style family.

Whatever the deep-seated causes for the kinds, shapes, and intensities of Richardson's imagined patterns of human behavior in Pamela—patterns that evoke feelings in the reader and derive from the author's psychological orientation—they seem to have borrowed qualities from models in his world. No doubt some of these were among his friends, family, employees, business associates, casual contacts, and we shall never know them. But others were the prominent figures of his day, the people everyone talked about, analyzed, and had to consider in estimating the way of the world and one's own prospects in life. Imagining himself into a representative world for his art, Richardson necessarily fused elements and symbols of England's actors with those in his own drama: preeminently Pamela herself and Mr. B., but also all the others into whom he is putting his mind. Incorporating the symbolic external context in which the prominent prime minister was attacked and probably soon to be replaced, and exploiting the politics of the family and journalistic materials from as far back as the sensational Charteris trial, he can solidify in Pamela his personal vision of the hitherto unknown self arriving to reconcile and harmonize.

The sense of self, fused with the Cinderella story at this time by Richardson's sort of imagination (as against, say, Prometheus or Jack the Giant Killer or Daedalus or the ugly duckling, some other versions of the emerging bourgeois), becomes in his time and through his experiences tied also to the hope for a coherent polity transcending parties and guaranteeing legitimacy: Mrs. Jervis, Mrs. Jewkes, Longman, Robin, John Arnold, and the rest can unite to praise the union of ruler and chief minister. If the powers can be vested in figures like Mr. B. and Pamela, vigorous young royalty and creative, altruistic new minister, king and national representative perfectly matched and urged on by religion, patriotism, and good will, the power relations will not be eliminated—for that is death in Richardson's world—but rightly shaped. The family will work together under Pamela's management, as the state will be harmonious within itself and honored by its competitors: the model of life animated by Richardson's projected selves will profit from imminent change, which itself is one aspect of the projected new order.

When Fielding published his first response to Richardson's model, he had been for a year and a half a journalist exposing political orthodoxy as hypocrisy, wielding the club of Hercules in the Champion against Walpole's administration. In this role, he was accustomed to examining an administration position, often as developed in a written text (usually in the Daily Gazetteer), and deriving extreme inferences about its motives: very much the procedure of Shamela. He accepts the data of Pamela, the same characters and actions, but by interpreting, explaining, and evaluating them he offers to lead his readers to a clearer understanding of the world. In both the Champion and Shamela much of this new view involves sharing high-spirited fooling with his audience, much presents a serious picture of the world, and some projects his deepest hopes and fears for himself. Beginning with Shamela, he seems to use the fictions even to subvert his own obligatory certainties as a political journalist, subjecting his extremes of party bias to ironic integration with other perspectives in the worlds of art.

But Fielding generally provides a deliberate observer of the figures in action, keeping distance between this observer and the expanded fragment of himself, not like Richardson impelling himself into the passions of that fragment. He can therefore make himself a comic butt and cautionary text; where Swift's “personating” his own wild tendencies in figures from the Tale of a Tub's mad Hack to the vicious speaker of Directions to Servants could lead to dangerous misunderstanding by his readers, Fielding tries to protect himself through normative mediators. Actions and characters like Shamela's constitute a farcical version of life, but since the issues relate seriously to the polity of the model household of Mr. B. and of England, Fielding projects a representative judge in Parson Oliver, who even reflects his author in having two potentially stirred daughters. Furthermore, in this first substantial effort at fiction, Fielding splits the observing function in two, adding Parson Tickletext (a name particularly suited for a political journalist), an alter ego who stops being the dupe of politics once he understands its true expression in Shamela's career. Fielding had used distinctive and opposed alter egos—the bumptious bear-garden wrestler Hercules Vinegar and the cool gentlemen who write sane, harmonious, educated letters to the Champion—as far back as The Author's Farce (1730), and here the Rehearsal model, where the opposed pair comment on the action, neatly helps him record the effect of clear vision on himself.

In Shamela the immediate object of attack is the falsity of Pamela's world, with which Fielding has his reader contrast reality in a nation that is preparing, after intensifying maneuvers among self-seeking politicians, to vote out Walpole. To behave as Richardson's creatures do, Pamela's father must have been a thievish, treasonous soldier, her mother a whore who sold oranges at the playhouse, and Parson Williams a sensualist who admires his model in hypocritical Whitefield. Like any other thieves, Pamela and her mother quarrel as readily as the politicians in the contemporary world of plums and places chronicled in the Champion or the coming Jonathan Wild. Instead of loyally supporting the squire like Richardson's servants, Fielding's servants first group around Shamela to exploit Booby's weakness, then curry favor with her as the new power in the house; each is for himself, and none for king and country. Still, they do hang together, at a time when, according to the Daily Gazetteers of March 4 and 11, 1741, Fielding in the Champion was preaching doom and calling for a treasonous union of the people against both King and Parliament.

But these attitudes of Richardson and Fielding, like others tied to their visions of human nature acting in the world, reflect their own lives and the ways they conceive themselves. And the self-views are complicated by moral concerns, which in Fielding's fiction usually are expressed in the exploration of ambiguities. Richardson fears but also admires the schemer in the self, the thrust that stops at nothing for success; Fielding, particularly in times of heightened critical introspection like spring of 1741, fears both the accusation of prostitution and its actuality. Intensely competitive, unlike Richardson he has a genteel horror of competitiveness. Richardson's heroine, the self aspiring toward power in a higher sphere, becomes for Fielding the sinister Jonathan Wild part of the self to be suppressed. Where Richardson sees the world as a field of strife in which each of two matched combatants both sues and grants, Fielding shows the less powerful always in danger, both from exploitation by the more powerful and from a willingness to sell oneself.

His bumptious figures, bursting forward with extreme versions of decent intentions, are like their overdoing author always subject to misinterpretation; and the norms, the representatives of decorous everyman, are even worse understood. Sometimes they yield because they are weak and sometimes because they are courteous, and always they must fear selfish prostitution. Even in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia—to say nothing of Jonathan Wild with its bewildering layers of irony—where his perspectives are as controlled as in Shamela, where all the heroes are morally attractive, circumstances make them look bad, as Fielding's own noble intentions were doubted when he acted in the public world.

Particularly in Shamela, Williams, the older women, and Tickletext, Fielding shows not only reasons why he was moving away from party writing at this time, but also his worry over his own tendencies. The novel is a burlesque of the aspiring turbulent self, Pamela seen as Shamela, a recurrent figure in Fielding that always wants rights denied to others. Booby, a ruler ruled by passion combined with the pride that denies only for itself the normal consequences of actions, as gullible sexually as Jonathan Wild, has criminally invited his own exploitation. Any pander can rule him, and through him his dependents, for he is seducible by pleasure; if Lady Mary, Arthur Murphy, and Fielding himself in Amelia are to be credited on Fielding's character, Booby is in part a rueful retrospect on his author. Williams is not only a professional teacher of morality—like the aspiring artist Fielding—but vain of his learning (the only learned person among the actors in the book) and dependent on a patron; he even resembles Fielding in owing £150, roughly the debt Fielding was incurring at the moment of Shamela's publication;¹⁷ he is arrested for debt, the danger Fielding had been alert to since the Licensing Act, would have feared at the moment, and was not to be free from till his move to the magistracy. In the simmering insolence of Shamela and Williams, both resentful of their subordination, scornful of Squire Booby and yet aware that he had conventional power over them, Fielding embodies both his conception of politicians and his sense of being identified with them.

In this farce, then, Fielding as the genteel observer and exposer uses exaggerated versions of his turbulent self to act out mad puppet shows before us, beginning with the puffs by the author to himself, by John Puff to the editor, and by the venal author to Miss Fanny. Combining the two sorts of casts from his dramatic practice, he has the country squire at odds with the family of selfish, quarrelsome servants of the political farces (The Grub-Street Opera, The Historical Register), and associates these servants with the designing, vulgar, broadly predatory figures of the low-life farces (The Old Debauchees, The Covent-Garden Tragedy). He had been sufficiently accused of political prostitution by now to adopt the metaphor. The action is the most elementary one of discovering that Mr. B., squire or king, has found the servant/politician/prostitute desirable, and then making him pay for her while she indulges her crudest whims. When, as is inevitable with such characters, the selfishness leads to violent hatred, one manipulative politician is sure to betray another, and the letters—in the outside world, the documents demanded of the Walpole administration—become available to the serious conscience of the piece and of society, Parson Oliver, who can make the right journalistic use of them. He exposes Shamela and Williams, providing the sane, humane spokesman's final judgment on the selfish lunatics of the farces.

Foreshadowing Wild at a time when Fielding had recently left his first political newspapers, as Walpole struggled to maintain himself and party leaders were pouncing in and out of alliances, Shamela comes at a suitable point for Fielding's disgust. In February 1741, the same month in which one of Shamela's targets (Middleton's Life of Cicero) was published, Sandys had made his motion for the Commons to petition for Walpole's dismissal, touching off a particularly bitter political flurry. Walpole decisively won that vote in Commons in February, but the momentum lay with his opponents for the national election in May and June. A new parliament, defections in Walpole's majorities in December, and his fall in February 1742 ensued. Aside from political implications in his fiction, Fielding's substantial political piece of this tumultuous period after the Champion and The History of Our Own Times was The Opposition: A Vision, a plague on so many houses that until Thomas Cleary's recent demonstration of its Broad-Bottom orthodoxy some scholars considered it a corrupt turn to Walpole for money.¹⁸

Although Shamela was not a political allegory, the prefatory attacks on Cibber's Apology and Middleton's Life of Cicero, each dedicated to a Walpole supporter (Henry Pelham and Lord Hervey respectively), suggest a political context. Furthermore, as Hugh Amory has noticed, Fielding had a Walpole/Williams analogy in mind for his readers.¹⁹ John Puff, in his introductory puff of the editor, says that the unknown author is the ideal person to “undertake the life of his Honour”—in all interpretations Walpole—“[f]or he who drew the character of Parson Williams, is equal to the task; nay, he seems to have little more to do than to pull off the parson's gown, and that which makes him so agreeable to Shamela, and the cap will fit” (303). Burly like Walpole, Williams has Walpole's red face and addictions to hunting, tobacco, and smutty talk. And besides echoing all the jokes from the Grub-Street Opera through The Historical Register and after, in farces and cartoons, about Walpole's fooling his stupid master, Fielding has Booby echo attacks on Walpole as arriviste, complaining how Williams's “family hath been raised from the dunghill by ours” (333).

Since this burlesque (like Pamela) involves the rise of an aspiring figure rather than that figure's continuous maneuverings in power, it suggests a model for coming action, the archetypal rise of a new vulgarian who can play prince off against Prime Minister. The ruler can be the current king, or the Prince of Wales (a weak philanderer in The Historical Register, as in Lord Hervey's view and Horace Walpole's letters), or any successor. Booby would be the nation's visible symbol of power whatever face he wore. With Mrs. Jervis and Mrs. Andrews working to press Shamela into Booby's bed and privileges, we have an exact equivalent of Horace Walpole's comment, during the decisive political battles of the ensuing December, that his father and William Pulteney (the chief of the Opposition) were a couple of old bawds bidding for the newly elected members of Parliament.²⁰ If I may add another hint, not centrally developed but at least faintly apprehensible when we consider Pamela, Fielding's later heroines, and the Daily Gazetteer of March 11, 1741, in which Britannia personified warns the Champion not to subvert national harmony, Shamela suggests also the English nation—at least the electorate, selfishly betraying the booby ruler with Walpole under the eyes of competing exploiters. Finally, the vision of Booby instituting court proceedings against Williams, and the triumphant fusion of the alter egos Oliver and Tickletext in Oliver's sane viewpoint, suggest hope for the nation through just Fielding's sort of exposure of political insolence and shame.

Though its subject heavily determines the directions in which this burlesque goes, that subject was chosen by Fielding in consonance with his own psychological patterns and the ways he saw the world at that point: toward the end of an intense stint as a political journalist and after recent training as a lawyer (a Tickletext). In its focus on exposure of duplicity and conspiracy it reflects that activity. Right out of his anti-administration journalism came the contempt for Booby and the bitterness toward the maneuvers of Williams and the servants, with the success of the scheming ministers a consequence of their venality and the folly of the ruler. But their own mutual distrusts and evil souls seem to promise, under the prodding of the genteel alter ego Oliver (and the conversion of the populist alter ego Tickletext), a reform consequent on the exposure. At the end, Booby's legal proceedings parallel the king's being forced to support an investigation of Walpole and the whole governing body for corruption.

Fielding's imagination has worked out for him, on the stock of his own impulses and self-recognitions, a restoration of order marked by awareness of instability even in himself. Servants (politicians) being what they are, and Booby and Fielding being what they are, what guarantees are there for them or the nation even after Walpole and the Champion? Anticipating an election campaign to which as Champion he had contributed but from which he was considering removing himself, Fielding does retain faith in genteel, traditional good sense, without which his political journalism would have been institutionalized cynicism. Fear of yielding to that cynicism, I think, contributed to his abandoning that career for a while. Still, even if Shamela and Booby represent the real condition of country and king—with Shamela's bastard hinting at the Jacobite problem—under the laws and through the immemorially humane values of Oliver the future could be providentially cleared.

In the visibly declining stage of Walpole's rule, Fielding sees, less confidently and through the distorting vision of burlesque, a world much like Richardson's: wild selfish maneuvering with some hopeful prospects. But the hope is of a different sort, the moralist's prayer for an altruistic transformation, a return to sanity and integrity, which he embodies not in an actor but in an observer given authority by society: an honorable, public-spirited, impartial judge. If the prospects for a whole nation's reform were faint, Fielding's monitory fiction could at least crystallize those for his own; as I read Shamela, it projects his wish to purge, live cleanly, and give up politics, in fellowship with a literature that gives up Pamela and a nation reformed of Walpole.

Notes

1. Noticed in the Universal Spectator, February 22, 1729.

2. John, Lord Hervey, Some Materials Toward Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed. Romney Sedgwick (1931; reprint, N.Y.: AMS Press, 1970) 3:691. Romney Sedgwick (The House of Commons 1715-1754 [London: HM Stationery Office, 1970]. 1:40) points out that “At this time the King was still the effective head of the Government; ministers regarded and referred to him as their ‘Master’ and themselves as his ‘servants.’ …”

3. One of the most absurd incidents in these quarrels may have turned Richardson's imagination toward the coach flight in the novel. In 1737, the prince rushed his wife out of Hampton Court as she was about to go into labor with their first child, so that she might have borne the heir to the throne in a rushing coach. To make sure the country was well up on this folly, someone published the prince's insolent letters to his parents and their stuffy replies: Letters in the Original, with Translations, and Messages, that passed between the King, Queen, Prince, and Princess of Wales, on Occasion of the Birth of the young Princess, 1737.

4. Pamela, ed. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 49. This version of the first edition is my text throughout.

5. Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second, ed. Lord Holland (1846; reprint, N.Y.: AMS Press, 1970) 1:177, n. 3.

6. George's new local mistress in 1737, Lady Deloranie, claimed that she was performing a patriotic function by seducing the king from his continental distractions (Hervey 3:745). The king stayed in England while Richardson wrote Pamela in late 1739, though he did laboriously move his household from Kensington Palace to St. James's (Daily Gazetteer, Sept. 3, 1739, to Oct. 29, 1739).

7. William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole. Earl of Orford (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Browne, 1816), 2:267.

8. J. H. Plumb (Sir Robert Walpole. The King's Minister [London: Cresset, 1960], 160) describes Caroline, and royal domestic relations, as if he had taken Pamela as his source.

9. Weekly Miscellany of August 26, 1737; September 2, 1737; September 23, 1737; December 2, 1737; July 21, 1738; London Evening Post, June 5-7, 1740.

10. Weekly Miscellany, July 21, 1738.

11. Henry Fielding, The Voyages of Mr. Job Vinegar from “The Champion,” ed. S. J. Sackett. Augustan Reprint Society no. 67 (Univ. of California Press, 1958), 34. Walpole's son Horace recalls in a letter of May 22, 1746, how the Opposition Craftsman “used to treat him so roundly with being nobody's son” (Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1941] 9:26).

12. Pierre Marivaux, La Vie de Marianne, part 7, in Romans, ed. Marcel Arland (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 343.

13. Cf. Common Sense, October 21, 1738, reprinted in London Magazine 7 (1738): 507-8; Common Sense, January 13, 1739, reprinted in London Magazine 8 (1739): 35-37; Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Division I. Political and Personal Satires. Prepared by Federic George Stephens and Edward Hawkins. III, i, 374. For the prominence of Walpole in the literary imagination, see particularly Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969) and Jerry C. Beasley, Novels of the 1740s (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1982), 13ff.

14. See Paul S. Fritz, The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1975).

15. Hervey 3:656ff.

16. Sedgwick (1:40ff.) stresses both the newness and the power that Walpole represented. Lucy Sutherland (“The City of London in Eighteenth-Century Politics,” in Richard Pares and A. J. P. Taylor, eds., Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier [London: Macmillan, 1956], 49-74) points out that in the city “on the fall of Walpole in 1742, it was widely believed that sweeping constitutional changes would follow” (63).

17. See Martin C. Battestin, “Fielding's Changing Politics and Joseph Andrews,” Philological Quarterly 39 (1960): 43.

18. Thomas R. Clearly (Henry Fielding: Political Writer [Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 1984], 152-62) summarizes the viewpoints and neatly demonstrates that the pamphlet represented normal Broad-Bottom distrust of Opposition figures like Pulteney.

19. Hugh Amory, “Shamela as Aesopic Satire,” ELH 38 (1971): 250. Charles B. Woods (“Fielding and the Authorship of Shamela,” Philological Quarterly 25 (1946): 254) had noted the satire on Walpole in the prefatory letter by John Puff. Cleary (150-52) mentions the obvious political allusions in Shamela. My text for Shamela is Martin C. Battestin, ed., Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961).

20. On December 10, 1741 (Correspondence 17:232). Prince Frederick's problems with mistresses had long been notorious, and George II's spring trips to Hanover for greater sexual freedom were a standing joke, coming even into Johnson's sober London (lines 246-47). In the Oppositions' easy harvest of absurdities, the king, Walpole, and Cibber sometimes merged with each other, so that Fielding's mixture of associations would have been understood. In its July 24-26, 1740, issue, for example, the London Evening Post compared Cibber's current trip to France to attract an actress to his theater to George's Hanoverian dalliance.